Tuesday, July 29, 2008

A workmate pointed me to an article on the Register by Ted Dziuba about threads (one of my personal hates) which made me laugh out loud. This guy can really poke some fun at the buzzwords that float around the blogosphere.

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

After a bit of hacking glChess can run on Windows. The only thing that would take major work is the AIs as they are forked off the main process (fork() is not supported in Windows). But aside from that with a few minor changes and running directly from the source leads to this:

I was very impressed with the quality of the Windows packages for the dependencies. When I tried this about a year ago it didn't appear they were all supported. They are now:

Friday, May 09, 2008

Since my posts are now being amplified by Planet Gnome I should take this time to introduce myself... Hi, my name is Robert Ancell and I am an open-source developer currently active in Gnome Games (particularly the chess game which I started many years ago and was merged into Gnome in 2.18) and I am the maintainer of GCalctool having taken over from Rich Burridge for the 2.22 release (I swear he sneaked that over to me when I wasn't watching ;) ).

In my more pays-the-rent side of life I am a software engineer having come from an embedded background and now working for a large financial organisation in Sydney, Australia. I get into open-source code when I have some spare time which leads to fairly unpredictable progress on projects (actually I normally find I have time after a release so I get a release worth of duplicates before the change is released - now that's Murphey's law!).

My goals for Gnome currently is to get the code I'm working on simpler and more reliable. This goal will inevitable slip when I find some flashy feature to introduce :).

p.s. I don't actually play chess so fear ye all who left me writing the Gnome version!

After upgrading to Ubuntu 8.04 it appears my automatic bug reporting is disabled. Due to the number of Ubuntu sourced reports coming in for Gnome Games it can't be disabled on everyone's system... So a bit of investigation showed it might be apport. Looking in /etc/init.d/apport showed this was disabled so I enabled that by editing /etc/default/apport and set enabled=1. After /etc/init.d/apport restart I could happily file away a nautilus bug.

But wait a minute... That report went to Launchpad, not Gnome Bugzilla! (Wouldn't it be a nice world in which Ubuntu got the flood of duplicates for the things we fix but they never update </gripe>). It appears apport is only enabled during development so I shouldn't have had to enable it. I figure it is bug-buddy that normally catches bugs and sends to Gnome; is anyone else getting this/know how to tell if the crash catcher is running?

Tuesday, April 08, 2008

I was flicking through the GNOME reminders for the 2.22.1 release not really thinking then I realised for Gcalctool that means me... So on the last day I ran through the release instructions (very well written). Got through all the steps except make distcheck isn't working and I didn't have the permissions to upload (got the outgoing maintainer Rich to do that step).

Anyway; let the announcing begin!

The Gcalctool team is proud to annouce the release of Gcalctool 5.22.1.This release contains the following changes:

Fix for bug where the initial zero in the display was not cleared (bug #520525)

Support bracket and multiply keys on non-english keyboards (bugs#521620 and #526671)

The replacement of sprintf() and strcpy() with the safer snprintf()and strncpy() (bug #520769)

Wednesday, January 23, 2008

Just to let you know that I think Linux is just great. I plugged in the old Cannon Printer and the HP 3300C Scanjet and they both worked without a hitch.

I think I installed 5.04 on my fathers laptop a few years ago. I upgraded him to 7.10 the other month (he would have been able to do it himself but I had to flash the bios to get rid of a password and enable CD-ROM booting). The only additional application he needs to add is Gramps (Genealogy). From the perspective of someone wanting things to "just work" each release has been definitely been getting better.